Hollywood is full of alternate movie history. An actor or director gets attached to project and then a few months, or even years, later is forced to drop out. It's the reason we have Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, or that Christopher Nolan directed Interstellar and not Steven Spielberg. A lot of the time this just gets chalked up to scheduling conflicts and we never really learn the truth.

But today we learned of some fun alternate movie history that affects two different movies, Oblivion and Zero Dark Thirty.

Jessica Chastain recently relayed the story of how the star of the former made the latter possible for her.

When Joseph Kosinski's follow-up film to Tron: Legacy was announced, it was going to star Tom Cruise and Chastain. A few months before filming, however, Chastain got a call from Kathryn Bigelow asking her if she'd star in her movie about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. There was only one problem. Oblivion and Zero Dark Thirty would film at the same time, and Chastain was already contractually obligated to do the former. But then Tom Cruise intervened.

Cruise gave his full support to the actress, and convinced the studio to let her out of her contract so that she could do Zero Dark Thirty. As Chastain, who would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for her role, described the situation, "He's a pretty incredible human" and that she still hopes to "find something in the future to do with him because I’m very grateful.”

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